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Magic Quadrant for Business IntelligencePlatforms

29 January 2010

Rita L. Sallam, Bill Hostmann, James Richardson, Andreas Bitterer

Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00173700

In 2009, megavendors held almost two-thirds of businessintelligence platform market share. But impatient businessusers increasingly turned to pure-play BI platforms, particularly those of small innovative vendors, to fill usability andtime-to-value needs unmet by the larger vendors.

What YouNeed to Know

This document presents a global view of Gartner's opinion of the mainsoftware vendors that should be considered by organizations seeking todevelop business intelligence (BI) applications. Buyers should evaluatevendors in all fourquadrants and not assume that only highly ratedorganizations can deliver successful BI implementations. Year-to-yearcomparisons of vendor positions are not particularly useful given marketdynamics (such as emerging competitors, new product road maps, newbuying centers) and client concerns/inquiries have changed since our lastMagic Quadrant. Therefore, we have evaluated vendors based on these newmarket dynamics and have reflected the changes in our Magic Quadrantcriteria evaluation weights for 2010. For further guidance on the MagicQuadrant evaluation process and on how to use a Magic Quadrant, see "MagicQuadrants and MarketScopes: How Gartner Evaluates Vendors Within aMarket."

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Vendors Added or Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for MagicQuadrants and MarketScopes as markets change. As a resultof these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any MagicQuadrant orMarketScope may change over time. A vendorappearing in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year andnot the next does not necessarily indicate that we havechanged our opinion of that vendor. This may be a reflectionof a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluationcriteria, or a change of focus by a vendor.

Note 1

Infor

We believe that Infor currently carries at least $4.5 billion indebt, used primarily to fund acquisitions (Infor has indicatedthat this figure ismaterially overstated, but has not providedadditional information). This is a highly leveraged companyby enterprise application software vendor standards. Gartnersuggests that users bear this in mind in discussions withInfor, and seek assurance that the company has thewherewithal to execute on the components of its strategythat are relevant to users' specific strategic requirements.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Magic Quadrant

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms

Source: Gartner (January 2010)

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Market Overview

The market in 2009 was defined by the David and Goliathian struggle thatoccurred between resilient BI pure-play vendors and ostensibly omnipotentmegavendors. The frenzy caused by major BI platform market consolidationin 2007 and 2008 gave way to a postacquisition hangover in 2009 in whichmegavendors' customers reported greater overall dissatisfaction due, in largepart, to the often messy postacquisition "digestion" process. Yet, despitemegavendor acquisition "growing pains," stack-centric buying led byapplications and information infrastructure dominated BI platform investmentdecisions in 2009 with the top five vendors controlling 75% of the market. Atthe same time, however, based on the research conducted for this report andinteractions with Gartner customers over the year, there is significant, if noteuphoric, satisfaction with, and accelerated interest in, pure-play BIplatforms. This is particularly true for smaller, innovative vendors fillingneeds left unmet by the larger vendors. To understand this paradox, it isnecessary to consider a number of factors that are driving the BI platform

Ability to Execute

Product/Service:

Core goods and services offered by thevendor that compete in/serve the defined market. Thisincludes current product/service capabilities, quality, featuresets and skills, whether offered natively or through OEMagreements/partners hips as defined in the

market definitionand detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy,Organization):

Viability includes an assessment of theoverall organization's financial health, the financial andpractical success of the business unit, and the likelihood thatthe individual business unit will continue investing in theproduct, will continue offering the product and will advancethe state of the art within the organization's portfolio ofproducts.

Sales Execution/Pricing:

The vendor's capabilities in allpre-sales activities and the structure that supports them. Thisincludes deal management, pricing and negotiation, pre-salessupport and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

The clarity, quality, creativity andefficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization'smessage to influence the market, promote the brand andbusiness, increase awareness of the products, and establish apositive identification with the product/brand andorganization in the minds of buyers. This mind share can bedriven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives,thought leadership, word-of-mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience:

Relationships, products andservices/programsthat enable clients to be successful withthe products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the wayscustomers receive technical support or account support. Thiscan also include ancillary tools, customer support programs(and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.

Operations:

The ability of the organization to meet its goalsand commitments. Factors include the quality of theorganizational structure, including skills, experiences,programs, systems and other vehicles that enable theorganization to operate effectively and efficiently on anongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision

Market Understanding:

Ability of the vendor to understandbuyers' wants and needs and to translate those into productsand services. Vendors that show the highest degree of visionlisten to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and canshape or enhance those with their added

vision.

Marketing Strategy:

A clear, differentiated set of messagesconsistently communicated throughout the organization andexternalized through the website, advertising, customerprograms and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy:

The strategy for selling products that usesthe appropriate network of direct and indirect sales,marketing, service and communication affiliates that extendthe scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise,buying decision today:

1.

Growing bifurcation of stack versus departmental BI buying.Marketbifurcation continues toward strategic I T-led stack-centric buyingbased on dominant applications or information infrastructure stackson the one hand, and business and department buying on the otherhand. Pressured by new economic realities and the

architectures to address their unmet ease-of-use and rapiddeployment needs. The perceived benefit is so compelling thatbusiness users are making this choice, despite the risk of creatingfragmented silos of applications and tools.

2.

Last year's Visionaries become this year's Challengers. Drivenlargely by business user buying, the data discovery tool architecturepioneered by last year's Visionaries (for example, QlikTech[QlikView] and Tibco Software [Spotfire]) and new Magic Quadrantentrant Tableau isnow becoming much more accepted in theindustry. Organizations are rapidly embracing the idea of providingdata to end users and empowering them with an ability to navigateand visualize the data in a "surf and save" mode as an alternative toa report-only

architecture. Threatened by the success of thesevendors (and adding to their credibility), traditional BI platformvendors are attempting to imitate them with easy-to-use interactivevisualization alternatives (for example, Microsoft with PowerPivot,SAP

tools can be used as full-functioned BI platforms for a broader rangeof BI platform capabilities and use cases (beyond rapidprototyping), justifies the significant move of these vendors fromthe Visionaries to the Challengers quadrant. A "Z"-shapedmovement in the Magic Quadrant from the Visionaries to Leadersquadrants is typical, as a vendor that may have been visionary in aspecific segment becomes subject to a broader visionary lens andexpanded buying requirements. The response of the traditional BI

vendors to these new market Challengers will accelerate in 2010and will likely lead to further industry consolidation, while at thesame time putting pressure on Challengers that don't improve theirenterprise capabilities and continue to innovate.

3.

Acquisition transition takes its toll on customers.

Customer turmoilfrom acquisitions typically follows a life cycle. I nitially, there issignificant customer concern because of uncertainty about productroad maps and commitment. This is followed by the actualexecution of the acquisition transition in which support, contracting,pricing, sales territory alignments and products are often changed.This transition process takes time and is not easy on customers.Successful acquisitions at some point complete the

transition andreach a new "normal" for customers. While Oracle, which acquiredSiebel and Hyperion in 2005 and 2007 respectively, seems to besuccessfully exiting the back of this curve, as shown by significantlyimproved Magic Quadrant customer survey results this year overlast, weak customer survey results for IBM and SAP suggest thatthey are still in the throes of this transition. This heightened level ofcustomer dissatisfaction revealed in the customer survey is reflectedtechnologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy:

The vendor's approach toproduct development and delivery that emphasizesdifferentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets asthey map to current and future requirements.

Business Model:

The soundness and logic of the vendor'sunderlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy:

The vendor's strategy to directresources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs ofindividual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation:

Direct, related, complementary and synergisticlayouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment,consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy:

The vendor's strategy to directresources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs ofgeographies outside the "home" or native geography, eitherdirectly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries asappropriate for that geography and market.

in these vendors' Abilityto Execute positions.

4.

Shift from measurement to analysis, forecasting and optimization.While reporting remained the dominant style of information deliveryof BI in 2009, the increased proliferation of interactive visualizationtools pushed the power of data analysis and discovery into thehands of a larger number of users than ever before. Moreover,driven in part by the economic downturn, the need for moreaccurate forecasts and optimized business processes, and to identifyleading versus lagging indicators, was on the rise. In response, IBMacquired predictive analytics market leader SPSS in the only majoracquisition by a BI platform vendor in 2009. At the same time,many pure-play vendors (Information Builders, Tibco Software[Spotfire], MicroStrategy)

and most of the megavendors (SAP, IBM,Microsoft) either introduced or matured capabilities to makestatistics, predictive analytic models and forecasting algorithmsmore consumable in reports, dashboards and analytic applications.These advances constitute important steps toward increasing theavailability of predictive analytics to business users beyond thetraditional statistician installed base. This shift in market center forpredictive analytics has also resulted in a narrowing ofCompleteness of Vision leadership between SAS and many of theother BI market players.

5.

Economic conditions driving interest in low-cost alternatives.BIspending remained firm in 2009 as organizations turned to BI tosurvive the worst downturn in modern history. While projects toimprove decision making, identify operating efficiencies and risk,and attract new customers more cost-effectively continued, theneed to do more with less—

extent, in alternativedeployment models, such as software as a service (SaaS). I nresponse, this report includes commentary on some alternativevendors in these categories, which, while not meeting the inclusioncriteria for the Magic Quadrant itself, offer a viable alternative forsome organizations with specific requirements.

I n the wake of the merger and acquisition turbulence of 2007 and 2008, 2009continued to be a year of transition, particularly for SAP and I BM. Businessusers in particular showed

a growing impatience with the time to deploy andcomplexity of traditional enterprise tools, which led to a rise in departmentalbuying of alternatives. Looking forward, 2010 is likely to be a critical year inwhich ease of use, time to value, scale and performance, and total cost ofownership will dominate the BI market narrative, while the ability to meshthe newly proliferated departmental silos with enterprise deployments will bea critical I T challenge. As the tough economic environment continues through2010, new opportunities will emerge to build new sources of growth andbusiness value. The ability of BI to identify and optimize these opportunitieswill be under greater pressure than ever to deliver results.

Forecast

Gartner's view is that the market for BI platforms will remain one of thefastest growing software markets despite the economic downturn. I n tougheconomic times, when competitiveness depends on the optimization ofstrategy and execution, organizations continue to turn to BI as a vital tool forsmarter, more agile and efficient business. According to Gartner's annualsurvey of CIO technology priorities, BI remained among the top five prioritiesin 2009 (and it was No. 1 in each of the previous four years). That said,however, the recession, commoditization and consolidation are expected toreduce BI platform growth from more than 20% in 2008 to single digits in2009 and beyond. The BI platform market's compound annual growth rate(CAGR) through 2013 is expected to be 6.3%, while the combined BI,analytics and performance management market's CAGR is expected to be8.1% through 2013.

CIOs continue to view BI among their top priorities for improvingdecision making and the operational efficiencies that drive top-linerevenue and bottom-line profitability. However, BI applicationsdropped from No. 1 in 2009 to No. 5 in Gartner's 2010 annualsurvey of CIO priorities.



The volume of information generated from enterprise applications isat a high. It will continue to increase. This data combined withunstructured data, which represents the majority of corporate datasources, along with newly generated cloud-based data, socialnetwork data and device data, must be accessible as part of, or anextension to, the corporate information infrastructure and madeavailable for analysis and decision making. BI platforms and BIapplications, seen as a key part of a Pattern-Based Strategy, willevolve to analyze this vast and increasing amount of diverse data todiscover significant weak signal and leading indicator patternsindicating opportunities and threats and to optimize businessdecisions.



Adoption of consumer application user interface paradigms (forexample, Google, iTunes) in the BI experience will extend thesuccess of interactive visualization tools, leading to a dramaticimprovement in BI usability and contributing to expanded usage.More intuitive and interactive BI tools and applications available ondevices and embedded in business applications, office productivitysuites and in custom business processes will further expand BI'spervasiveness.



Extending customer-facing website applications with BI capabilitiesfor revenue generation or as a value-adding service differentiatorusing rich Internet application techniques is another positive driverof BI growth. So is the need for on-demand scalability, potentiallyaddressed with cloud offerings.



BI SaaS adoption, while very low today, will grow steadily asmaturing BI SaaS solutions are delivered in private and publicclouds and in on-premises and off-premises configurations bytrusted vendors. This growth will be accelerated by organizations'increasing need to deploy intuitive BI tools and applications cost-effectively to more users, reduce time to value and time to scale,and lower capital expenditures. Beyond the initial cadre of smallstartup SaaS vendors, larger leading vendors are beginning topursue SaaS/cloud-based strategies, with most buildinginteroperability with cloud computing platforms, such as AmazonElastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Google's platform as a service (PaaS)offering and Microsoft's Azure platform. These same BI vendors arealso increasing their OEM efforts with SaaS application vendors andindustry data providers. The merging of analytics with industry dataand by industry data providers delivered via a SaaS model has beenone of the more widely adopted use cases for BI delivered as aservice and is another key growth driver.



While the core platform components (reporting, ad hoc analysis,online analytical processing [OLAP]) have reached maturity withminimal differences in delivered product functionality amongvendors (for example, we saw less variation in product scores thanin support or sales experience scores between vendors in this year'sMagic Quadrant customer reference survey), we expect innovationand growth to continue in emerging areas that make it highlyintuitive and rapid to use and deploy BI applications against avariety of enterprise and extraenterprise data sources at a verylarge scale. These include in-memory analytics, predictive analytics,content analytics, BI and search, interactive visualization, BI andsocial software and collaboration, BI delivered in the cloud, process-driven, real-time BI, rapid data integration and applicationprototyping, and analytic applications.



Gartner's user surveys show that improved decision making is thekey driver of BI purchases. However, most BI deploymentsemphasize information deliveryand analysis to support fact-baseddecision making, but fail to link BI content with the decision itself,the decision outcome, or with the related collaboration and otherdecision inputs. This makes it impossible to capture decision-makingbest practices.

Solutions are emerging that tie BI with socialsoftware and collaborative tools for higher-quality, more transparentdecisions that will increase the value derived from BI applications.



Leveraging BI into broad performance management initiatives,beyondthe office of finance and corporate performancemanagement (CPM) applications to other areas of the enterprise,such as sales performance management, HR performancemanagement and call center performance management, is anotherdriver of growth. In 2010, this convergence will begin to movebeyond basic dashboarding and scorecarding to incorporatepredictive analytics not only into the forecasting process, but also asa means of predicting what target thresholds should be and inidentifying leading and weak signal indicators as part of an overallPattern-Based Strategy. Gartner predicts that, through 2011,organizations that use performance management applications tosupport a performance-driven culture will outperform their peers by30%.



Adoption of open-source BI platforms will grow faster than adoptionof commercial platforms. While open-source functionality is not yeton a par with that of large commercial platforms and open-sourceBI platforms are still rarely seen as an enterprisewide BI standard,open-source BI tool deployment is growing solidly. In particular, it isgrowing from the vendors' OEM business, which cannot be properlysized, as many pure-play software vendors simply use thedownloadable version of the open-source BI product and add it asincremental functionality in their own applications. In addition,system integrators have started to build practices around open-source technology and are also implementing BI platforms (mostlyreports and dashboards) as part of the contracted solution. Thiswillbe an additional driver of growth.

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Market Definition/Description

BI platforms enable users to buildapplications that help organizations learn,understand and optimize their business. Gartner defines a BI platform as asoftware platform that delivers the 13 capabilities listed below. Thesecapabilities are organized into three categories of functionality: integration,information delivery and analysis. In 2009, enhancing integration between BIplatform components has been a major focus of megavendors digesting theirnumerous acquisitions. Information delivery continues to be a core focus ofmost BI projects today, but we see an increasing demand for tools thatenable easier and more intuitive analysis to discover new insights. TheGartner definition of "BI platform" has remained mostly consistent fromprevious years, but we have added a 13th capability this year for search-based BI.

Integration:



BI infrastructure—

All tools in the platform should use the samesecurity, metadata, administration, portal integration, object modeland query engine, and should share the same look and feel.



Metadata management—

Not only should all tools leverage thesame metadata, but the offering should provide a robust way tosearch, capture, store, reuse and publish metadata objects such asdimensions, hierarchies, measures, performance metrics and reportlayout objects.



Development tools—

The BI platform should provide a set ofprogrammatic development tools and a visual developmentenvironment, coupled with a software developer's kit for creating BIapplications, for integrating them into a business process and/orembedding them in another application. The BI platform should alsoenable developers to build BI applications without coding by usingwizard-like components for a graphical assembly process. Thedevelopment environment should also support Web services inperforming common tasks such as scheduling, delivering,administering and managing. In addition, the BI application shouldassign and track events or tasks allotted to specific users, based onpredefined business rules. Often, this capability is delivered byintegrating with a separate portal or workflow tool.



Collaboration—

This capability enables BI users to share anddiscuss information and/or manage hierarchies and metrics viadiscussion threads, chat and annotations either embedded in theapplication or through integration with collaboration, analyticalmaster data management (MDM) and social software.

This subset of reporting includes the ability to publishformal, Web-based reports with intuitive interactive displays ofinformation, including dials, gauges, sliders, check boxes and trafficlights. These displays indicatethe state of the performance metriccompared with a goal or target value. Increasingly, dashboards areused to disseminate real-time data from operational applications.



Ad hoc query—

This capability enables users to ask their ownquestions of the data, without relying on IT to create a report. Inparticular, the tools must have a robust semantic layer to allowusers to navigate available data sources. These tools should includea disconnected analysis capability that enables users to access BIcontent and

analyze data remotely without being connected to aserver-based BI application. In addition, these tools should offerquery governance and auditing capabilities to ensure that queriesperform well.



Microsoft Office integration—

In some cases, BI platforms are usedas a middle tier to manage, secure and execute BI tasks, butMicrosoft Office (particularly Excel) acts as the BI client. In thesecases, it is vital that the BI vendor provides integration withMicrosoft Office, including support for documentformats, formulas,data "refresh" and pivot tables. Advanced integration includes celllocking and write-back.



Search-based BI—

Applies a search index to both structured andunstructured data sources and maps them into a classificationstructure of dimensions and measures (often leveraging the BIsemantic layer) that users can easily navigate and explore using asearch (Google-like) interface.

Analysis:



OLAP—

This enables end users to analyze data with extremely fastquery and calculation performance, enabling a style of analysisknown as "slicing and dicing." This capability could span a variety ofstorage architectures, such as relational, multidimensional and in-memory.



Interactive visualization—

This gives the ability to display numerousaspects of the data more efficiently by using interactive pictures andcharts, instead of rows and columns. Over time, advancedvisualization will go beyond just slicing and dicing data to includemore process-driven BI projects, allowing all stakeholders to betterunderstand the workflow through a visual representation.



Predictive modeling and data mining—

This capability enablesorganizations to classify categorical variables and to estimatecontinuous variables using advanced mathematical techniques. BIdevelopers are able to integrate models easily into BI reports,dashboards and analysis.



Scorecards—

These take the metrics displayed in a dashboard astep further by applying them to a strategy map that aligns keyperformance indicators with a strategic objective. Scorecard metricsshould be linked to related reports and information to performfurther analysis. A scorecard implies the use of a performancemanagement methodology such as Six Sigma or a balancedscorecard framework.

That also supply transactional applications must show that their BIplatform is used routinely by organizations that do not use thevendor's transactional applications.



Must deliver at least nine of the 13 capabilities in the BI platformMarket Definition/Description section (not OEM components fromother vendors).



Must be able to obtain a minimum of 30

customer surveyresponses

that use the vendor platform as their enterprise BIplatform.

Gartner defines total software revenue as revenue generated from newlicenses, updates, subscriptions and hosting, technical support andmaintenance. Professional services revenue and hardware revenue are notincluded in total software revenue.

This year's Magic Quadrant customer survey included vendor-providedreferences, as well as survey responses from BI users in Gartner's BI summitand inquiry lists. There were 897 survey responses, with 143 fromnonvendor-supplied reference lists. To ensure the integrity of survey data,each survey response was checked by company respondent e-mail.Responses from software vendors or service providers, while a very smallnumber (less than 12), were eliminated from the aggregate results. Forsurvey responses from nonidentifiable e-mail accounts such as Gmail orYahoo accounts, the respondent was contacted and had to provide Gartnerwith a company e-mail address, company role and other contact informationto be included (this amounted to less than five responses, all of which werevetted and ultimately included). For more detail on the survey results, see"BI Platforms User Survey, 2010: How Customers Rate Their BI PlatformVendors" and "BI Platforms User Survey, 2010: How Vendor Customers RateTheir BI Platform Functionality," forthcoming at the time of writing.

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Added

Targit and Tableau were added to this year's Magic Quadrant, as both wereable to meet the inclusion criteria.

Even though they did not meet the criteria for inclusion, the follow alternativevendors are benefiting from the growth

of the BI platforms market and maybe worthy of consideration in BI evaluations.

BI Embedded in Business Process Management

One such vendor, IDS Scheer, based in Saarbrücken, Germany, is addressingBI from a business process optimization angle. IDS Scheer

is best known forits Aris product and its strong focus on business process management. Thereason for mentioning IDS Scheer in this report is that Aris customers areusing the "process intelligence and performance management" solution in away that combines analytics with business processes in a unique way. Most ofits traction in the BI platform space to date has been from combining metricswith processes and adding performance management and performancedashboard functionality to a company's process view. The Aris ProcessIntelligence solution extracts data points from monitored business processes,loads the data into a custom-made data mart and enables the end user to runvarious analyses. The tool provides automated process discovery techniquesto visualize the "as is" behavior (as-is process structures) within anorganization (without previous modeling), identify best practices, and provideprocess-centric benchmarking and service-level management. Referencecustomers describe interesting usage scenarios and tangible benefits withAris Process Performance Manager (Aris PPM) as it delivers insights thatcannot be achieved with data-centric BI solutions. However, this product setis not considered a generic BI platform as per the inclusion criteria of thisreport because it is applied only in process-specific subject area domains.

BI Embedded in Packaged Applications

Other vendors offer BI platforms that are specifically optimized for their ownenterprise applications. An example of this type of vendor isInfor (see Note1), a large global software vendor with more than 70,000 customers, whichhas its own BI platform offering based primarily on the former MIS and MPCproducts and includes some newly developed products. The offering includesthe Infor PM OLAP database, Infor PM Application Studio for end-user andfinancial reporting, newly introduced Infor Reporting for transactionalreporting, the Infor PM Office Plus Excel client, Infor PM Forecasting forpredictive modeling via a forecasting engine, and the newly introduced InforDecisions, a set of packaged, role-based analytic applications specificallydesigned for use with Infor applications. While Infor has a large installed baseof former MIS customers, it was not included in this year's Magic Quadrant

because it fell short of meeting the customer survey response inclusioncriteria and because, during the next year, Infor's products will be targetedprimarily at midsize organizations with Infor enterprise applications.

Departmental and Workgroup BI

Other emerging vendors that have not yet met the revenue inclusion criteriawere invited to participate in this year's Magic Quadrant Customer ReferenceSurvey for the first time. None of these vendors did quite as well as LogiXML,which fell just short of meeting the inclusion criteria for a number ofcustomer survey responses. These strong results suggest that its platform isgaining positive momentum and market traction. LogiXML's BI platform issold in a bundle that includes reporting, analysis and dashboards for both ITand nontechnical users, plus data integration. LogiXML targets small andmidsize businesses, departmental deployments, and software/SaaScompanies that embed their solution in their own tools and applications. Mostimplementations, many as part of customer-facing applications, are deployedto more than 500 users—

LogiXML's unlimited user license model makes iteconomical to do so. Although targeted more at BI developers and ITmanagers, LogiXML's products include an ad hoc reporting solution

fornontechnical end users. Much like the other departmental and workgroup BIplatform offerings, LogiXML's value proposition is ease of use, rapid time todeployment, and lower cost than the offerings of existing enterprise marketplayers.

SaaS

In the economic downturn, interest in SaaS solutions has increased in thepast year, although it is still a small fraction of the overall market. Theincrease has happened despite the business failure of LucidEra, one of theearly market contenders. SAP, followed by SAS, is perhaps the largest vendorin this submarket, but there are smaller vendors delivering BI as a service,including Birst, GoodData, Oco and PivotLink. Moving BI off-premises may notsuit all organizations and all use cases, especially those dealing with highlysensitive data. Many firms are evaluating hybrid options for deploymentsleveraging both private and public clouds, as well as a combination of on-premises and off-premises solutions. But firms that find the SaaS valueproposition of more rapid, lower-cost deployments attractive should evaluateSaaS as an option.

did. Although the number of surveyresponses was far less than the minimum, confirming Gartner's view thatthere has yet to be a significant uptake of BI delivered as a service, Ocoreferences were largely positive, albeit for small departmental deployments.Oco provides an end-to end solution that includes data integration, a datawarehouse, and reporting and data visualization capabilities with patentedtechnology in the area of data identification, discovery and integration thatenables transaction-level data from multiple sources to be quickly analyzed,integrated and loaded into a data warehouse. It also provides a set of bestpractice analytics aligned to key functional areas in target industries,including: supply chain analytics for manufacturing and distributionindustries; services performance analytics for business services andequipment industries; and revenue and profitability metrics and customer andsales management analytics. Oco formed a partnership with SAPBusinessObjects OnDemand in May 2008 that included deployment of the SAPBusinessObjects OnDemand tools on the Oco data warehouse with a set ofbest practice analytics.

Open Source

Beyond the emerging vendors, Gartner gave serious consideration, as it didlast year, to including open-source BI suppliers in the Magic Quadrant. Whilethis year, both major open-source BI platform suppliers generated enoughrevenue to be included in the Magic Quadrant, they did not garner enoughcustomer survey responses. Although they did not meet the referencesrequirement,Jaspersoft

andPentaho

have emerged as viable players inthe BI platform market. Both open-source vendors provide comprehensive BIplatform capabilities that are comparable in many functional areas with thoseof traditional BI platform vendors. A key part of both vendors' strategy is toforge OEM relationships with commercial independent software vendors(ISVs) looking to easily embed BI functionality at a low price point. Jaspersoftand Pentaho enable ISVs to embed their open-source BI components withoutbeing bound by the GNU General Public License terms and conditions. Giventheir subscription-based model, both vendors need to provide exceptionalsupport. This was reflected in the Magic Quadrant customer survey, as bothJaspersoft and Pentaho scored strongly on the customer support question—

higher than any of the megavendors for the second year in a row.

Jaspersoft, based in San Francisco, is a well-established brand in the open-source BI platform market. Founded in 2001, the vendor claims it is themarket leader in open-source BI, with more than 11,000 commercialcustomers worldwide. These customers include any entity that purchasedanything from Jaspersoft—

number of production deployments ofJaspersoft's commercial editions is unreported, and deployments ofcommunity editions are unclear. Actual numbers of production deploymentsare further muddied as Jaspersoft (and other open-source vendors) seemedto struggle to provide enough reference accounts to meet the 30-responseinclusion criterion of this year's Magic Quadrant customer survey. This could,in part, be due to the lack of standard account management practicesthrough which customer references are usually developed and to Jaspersoft'sparticularly high number of OEM partners (50% of Jaspersoft's commercialbusiness is through OEMs and an undocumented number of OEMs downloadand embed the free version of JasperReports in their applications). OEMpartners are excluded from participating in the BI platform Magic Quadrantcustomer reference survey. The newly announced Jaspersoft EnterpriseEdition, based on version 3.7 of its platform, includes JasperServer,JasperReports, the iReport report designer, the JasperAnalysis OLAP analysisserver, and JasperETL, which is the open-source extraction, transformationand loading (ETL) engine from Talend, plus Talend's Activity MonitoringConsole (which is part of the commercial edition). Jaspersoft has establisheda partner network that includes companies such as Sun Microsystems(including MySQL), Novell, Red Hat and Unisys. Many ISVs are also includingJasperReports as the reporting component in their software packages.

a fixed-price, fixed-deliverable BI service offering to migratecustomers from proprietary BI reporting tools to Pentaho Reporting. Despitehaving "hundreds of thousands of installations worldwide," Pentaho struggledto get users to take part in the Magic Quadrant reference survey (with justfive responses, all from North American firms with the smallest averageemployee count of customer references of any vendor surveyed). This couldbe because Pentaho has a direct client/customer relationship with only a tinyfraction of the overall user community—

approximately 220 new customerspurchased an annual subscription for Pentaho's Enterprise Edition products in2009 (with an average selling price of $24,000 for a first-year subscription).Firms purchasing Pentaho subscriptions receive enhanced functionality(extending the open-source functionality), electronic and phone support, andsoftware maintenance. From a functional perspective, the most significantcommunity collaboration and developer contributions in 2009 drove acomplete dashboard framework, ETL extensions including Google Analyticsand Google Docs integration, along with new user interfaces for self-servicedashboard creation and ad hoc query and reporting.

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Dropped

No vendors were dropped from this year's Magic Quadrant.

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Evaluation Criteria

Ability to Execute

Vendors are judged on their ability and success in making their vision amarket reality. In addition to the opinions of Gartner's analysts, the scoresand commentary in this document are based on three sources: customerperceptions of each vendor's strengths and challenges derived from BI-related inquiries with Gartner; an online survey of vendor customersconducted in late 2009, yielding 897 responses; and a vendor-completedquestionnaire about the vendor's BI strategy and operations.

Product/Service:*

How competitive and successful are the goods andservices offered by the vendor in this market? This includes currentproduct/service capabilities, quality, feature sets and skills, whether offerednatively or through OEM agreements/partnerships.

Overall Viability:

What is the likelihood of the vendor continuing to invest inproducts and services for its customers? Viability includes an assessment ofthe overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical successof the business unit, and the likelihood of the individual business unit tocontinue to invest in the product, continue to offer the product and advancethe state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing:*

Does the vendor provide cost-effective licensingand maintenance options? This covers the technology provider's capabilitiesin all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includesdeal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support and the overalleffectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness and Track Record:

Can the vendor respond tochanges in market direction as customer requirements evolve? This coversthe ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitivesuccess as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolveand market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the provider'shistory of responsiveness.

Market Execution:

Are customers aware of the vendor's offerings in themarket? This assesses the clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programsdesigned to deliver the organization's message in order to influence themarket, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the productsand establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organizationin the minds of buyers. This mind share can be driven by a combination ofpublicity, promotional, thought leadership, word-of-mouth and salesactivities.

Customer Experience:*

How well does the vendor support its customers?

Operations:

What is the ability of the organization to meet its goals andcommitments?

* These criteria are scored directly from input from the Magic Quadrantcustomer survey.

Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria

Weighting

Product/Service

High

Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy,Organization)

High

Sales Execution/Pricing

High

Market Responsiveness and Track Record

Standard

Marketing Execution

Standard

Customer Experience

High

Operations

Low

Source: Gartner

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Completeness of Vision

Vendors are rated on their understanding of how market forces can beexploited to createvalue for customers and opportunity for themselves. Inaddition to Gartner analysts' opinions, the scores and commentary in thisdocument are based on three sources: customer perceptions of each vendor'sstrengths and challenges derived from BI-related inquiries with Gartner; anonline survey of vendor customers conducted in late 2009, yielding 897responses; and a vendor-completed questionnaire about the vendor's BIstrategy and operations.

Market Understanding:

Does the vendor have the ability to understandbuyers' needs, and to translate those needs into products and services?

Marketing Strategy:

Does the vendor have a clear set of messages thatcommunicate its value and differentiation in the market?

Sales Strategy:

Does the vendor have the right combination of direct andindirect resources to extend its market reach?

Offering (Product) Strategy:

Does the vendor's approach to productdevelopment and delivery emphasize differentiation and functionality thatmaps

to current and future requirements?

Business Model:

How sound and logical is the vendor's underlying businessproposition? Note that this criterion has been given no rating because allvendors in the market have a viable business model.

Vertical/IndustryStrategy:

How well can the vendor meet the needs ofvarious industries, such as financial services or the retail industry?

Innovation:

How well does the vendor direct related, complementary andsynergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment,consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes? How well does the vendorexploit current or new technologies and combine them in a novel way toaddress a market need?

Geographic Strategy:

How well can the vendor meet the needs of locationsoutside its native country, either directly or through partners?

Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria

Weighting

Market Understanding

High

Marketing Strategy

High

Sales Strategy

Standard

Offering (Product) Strategy

High

Business Model

No rating

Vertical/Industry Strategy

Standard

Innovation

High

Geographic Strategy

Standard

Source: Gartner

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Leaders

Leaders are vendors that are reasonably strong in the breadth and depth oftheir BI platform capabilities and can deliver on enterprisewideimplementations that support a broad BI strategy. Leaders articulate abusinessproposition that resonates with buyers, supported by the viabilityand operational capability to deliver on a global basis.

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Challengers

Challengers offer a good breadth of BI platform functionality and are wellpositioned to succeed in the market. However, they may be limited to specificuse cases, technical environments or application domains. Their vision maybehampered by a lack of coordinated strategy across the various products intheir BI platform portfolio, or they may lack the sales channel, geographicpresence and industry-specific content offered by the vendors in the Leadersquadrant.

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Visionaries

Visionaries are vendors that have a strong vision for delivering a BI platform.They are distinguished by the openness and flexibility of their applicationarchitectures, and they offer depth of functionality in the areas they address,but they may have gaps relating to broader functionality requirements. AVisionary is a market thought-leader and innovator. However, it may haveyet to achieve sufficient scale—

or there may be concerns about its ability togrow and provide consistent execution.

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Niche Players

Niche Players are those that do well in a specific segment of the BI platformmarket—

such as reporting—

or that have limited capability to innovate oroutperform other vendors in the market. They may focus on a specific domainor aspect of BI, but are likely to lack depth of functionality elsewhere. Or theymay have gaps relating to broader BI platform functionality. Alternatively,Niche Players may have a reasonably broad BI platform, but have limitedimplementation and support capabilities or relatively limited customer bases.Or they may not yet have achieved the necessary scale to solidify theirmarket positions.

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Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Actuate

Strengths



Actuate's e.Reports is a well-established, scalable platform for "pixelperfect" static-management-style reports to large numbers of reportconsumers (both intranet and extranet). Actuate has been proven invery large extranet application deployments thatserve the financialand public sectors. The company plans to complete its acquisition ofXenos, a maker of high-volume ePresentment, printing and deliverysoftware also with a financial services focus, in February 2010.



Actuate is transitioning its product and marketing emphasis to itsopen-source commercial products based on Business Intelligenceand Reporting Tools (BIRT). Its investments in BIRT products andmarketing are starting to gain traction in the developer community(for example, BIRT Exchange Marketplace) and received positiveproduct feedback in our Magic Quadrant survey, albeit from a smallsample size—

and with new OEM customers.



Actuate's e.Spreadsheet reporting technology has strong capabilitiesfor spreadsheet-based information distribution and management.Actuate has also released its e.Spreadsheet Designer tool asfreeware from its BIRT Exchange community site.



The senior management team at Actuate is seasoned andexperienced at managing in difficult business conditions.

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Cautions



In our Magic Quadrant survey, cost was cited as the largest obstacleto larger deployments twice as often as it was for other vendors.One factor contributing to this was Actuate's terms and conditionsrestatement, which customers told us translated into unexpectedlyhigh fees for hardware upgrades.



Of the vendors in this Magic Quadrant, Actuate scored the lowest inour survey in terms of view of the vendor's future, view of thevendor's success in the organization and overall customerexperience. Most responses were from customers using e.Reports.The handful of customers surveyed that use the newer BIRT-basedproduct set provided more positive product ratings.



Customers have been using a narrower range of functionality thanhave customers of other vendors and have not been using Actuate'sproducts as their "BI standard" products. Only 28% of Actuatecustomers surveyed for the 2010 Magic Quadrant considered it theirenterprise BI standard, compared with the mean of 53% for allvendors.



A high percentage (20%) of Actuate customers in our MagicQuadrant survey indicated that they plan to replace Actuate'sproducts within five years. This compares with a mean of 7% for theother vendor references we surveyed.



Actuate's OLAP, ad hoc analysis and dashboard capabilities wereranked in the bottom three of vendors in this Magic Quadrant interms of functionality being deployed. Its narrower product focus onproduction reporting will exclude it from shortlists, as moreenterprises look to standardize on vendors that have been proven atproviding a more complete set of BI platform capabilities. Actuate11 (currently in beta testing) expands the BIRT-based product setwith in-memory analytics, dashboard builders and a unifieddevelopment platform.



Product and services revenue from the commercial versions of itsActuate BIRT open-source products constitute a growing percentageof the company's overall revenue, with a positive diversificationeffect attracting new open-source buyers rather than the traditionalbuyers of

its legacy portfolio of commercial e.Reports ande.Spreadsheet products. However, successes derived from Actuate'sBIRT strategy may not compensate for negative growth pressuresfrom a contraction in the overall economy (and in financial servicesin particular, from which Actuate derives approximately half itsrevenue) and increased competition in a consolidated BI market.

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arcplan

Strengths



Used predominantly by large companies in Western Europe, arcplanis well known as a successful front end for SAP NetWeaver BW. Itsability to work directly with SAP NetWeaver BW metadata remains astrong differentiator. The main reasons for selecting arcplanreported by survey respondents reflect this, with ease of use for endusers, data access and integration, integration with enterpriseapplications and integration with the information infrastructure mostcited. During 2009, arcplan added to its SAP-focused offerings bylaunching a new interface for SAP NetWeaver BI Integrated Planning(IP).



Compared with the overall sample, arcplan survey respondentsreported that they realized above-average benefits in making BIavailable to more users, expanding the types of analysis supported,and reducing non-IT costs, line-of-business costs and IT headcount.



Its process orientation and federated query and write-backcapabilities support the building of complex analytic applications inheterogeneous environments; for example, in delivering closed-loopplanning or supporting collaborative, unified operational andfinancial performance management. The advanced charting andmashup support in 2009's arcplan Enterprise 6.0 and 6.5 releasesfurther its ability to deliverinteractive rich Internet applications.

and by shifting its focus more towardperformance management, with the acquisition of LumenSoft andthe subsequent development of the arcplan Edge CPM offering.



arcplan has good BI platform integration. arcplan Enterprise isinternally consistent, offering well-integrated functionality forbuilding reports and dashboards with strong data federationcapabilities that include an extensive set of out-of-the-box datasource connectors.

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Cautions



Marketing itself as "complementary and nondisruptive" is anincreasingly weak position. For more than 10 years, arcplan hassuccessfully been seen as a value-adding partner to larger BIvendors, which has enabled it to coexist, and avoid competing, withthem. However, there is strong evidence that this is no longersustainable as a competitive position—

25% of arcplan customerrespondents plan to discontinue their use of arcplan products in thenext five years, a higher rate than for any other vendor in the MagicQuadrant. (In its defense, arcplan cites a 94% maintenance renewalrate.)



Its historic focus on SAP is a "two-edged sword." Just 4% of thearcplan customers taking part in the survey considered it their BIstandard—

the lowest of any vendor included in the MagicQuadrant. It's no surprise that 36% considered another BI platform,almost always SAP, their standard. The ongoing adoption of SAPBusinessObjects in the SAP installed base is a threat to arcplan'sfuture revenue stream in what has been its core market.



It has a diminishing functional differentiation—

arcplan'scompetitors are adding data federation capabilities to theirproducts, and such capabilities have always been one of the primarydifferentiators for arcplan.

arcplan needs to strengthen its channels to market. Despite growingits network of partners in 2009, it has a limited indirect channel,which it must build to maintain its market share and, in particular,to deliverthe vertical applications it lacks.

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Board International

Strengths



Board International is a long-established European company with awell-integrated BI platform. Board customers value the combinationof planning, reporting and analysis capabilities in a single integratedproduct.



Historically, Board has focused on developing and deploying customanalytic applications (on the same foundation as its CPMapplications) powered by its own OLAP database. However, thecapabilities added in the Board 7 release in 2009, including supportfor data federation across relational stores and widely usedmultidimensional engines (namely Microsoft SQL Server AnalysisServices and SAP NetWeaver BW), should make Board moresuitable for a broader range of BI use cases and more attractive tolarger firms than previously.

Overall feedback from Board's customers was good in the survey,rating it better than average in nine of the 13 functional capabilityareas surveyed, an impressive performance for one of the smallestvendors (in revenue terms) included in the Magic Quadrant.Customers reported above-average realization of businessbenefitsoverall, with above-average success in expanding BI to more users,broadening analysis, improving customer satisfaction and reducingIT head count.



For its size, Board has developed a credible partner OEM businessvia which it serves vertical industry needs (particularly inpharmaceuticals and foods). However, this group does not seem tobe growing.

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Cautions



As reported in 2008 and 2009, Board is little known outside its coremarkets in Europe, with a nascent presence elsewhere. Findingservice providers with experience implementing Board is still achallenge (and an inhibitor to growth) but its ecosystem is growing.



Of the Board customers surveyed, 61% consider its products theirBI standard, and few report using functionality from othercompeting vendors to address gaps in Board's products. However,according to the survey data gathered, deployments of Board

aresmall (an average of 72 users—

the only vendor in the MagicQuadrant with an average deployment below 100 users), in smallerfirms, and skewed to the departmental in usage.



Board technology is Windows only, limiting its potential to expandinto some

segments of the enterprise market.



More of Board's customers (26%) reported encountering issues withsoftware unreliability and bugs than for any other vendor in thesample. This may, in part, be explained by the significance of the7.0 release, which largely re-engineered the platform to takeadvantage of newer Microsoft elements (Windows CommunicationFoundation [WCF], Windows Presentation Foundation [WPF],Service-Oriented Architecture [SOA] and Silverlight).



Despite its evident success in the niche it serves, the Boardcustomers we surveyed expressed concern over the vendor's future,perhaps reflecting the tough competitive environment it faces.

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IBM

Strengths



The company has a well-integrated BI platform architecture. IBMCognos 8 remains much better integrated than most competingofferings, with shared metadata across the platform enabling easeof transfer from report to query to analysis. The benefit of thisarchitectural consistency was evident in the survey results, with IBMCognos customers reporting that they need only threeadministration staff per thousand users on average.



IBM Cognos has a high proportion of enterprisewide, enterprise-standard BI platform deployments—

almost three-quarters of theIBM customers Gartner contacted as part of this research considerits products a BI standard in their organization.

Global sales, industry and system integration capabilities from IBMgrew massively in 2009.In April 2009, IBM Global BusinessServices (GBS) announced the introduction of its Business Analyticsand Optimization (BAO) consulting practice with 4,000 consultantsfocused on BI and performance management. These dedicatedresources augment IBM Cognos'

IBM's vision for BI has substantially strengthened in the past 12months with a number of initiatives: a new midmarket offering, IBMCognos Express, which offers integrated planning, reporting andanalysis; the acquisition of SPSS with its very strong data mining,statistical and analytics capabilities, closing a gap in IBM Cognos'functionality; the launch of a new content analytics offering fortext/unstructured data; and an expanded set of deployment optionsincluding deployment via System z, embedded BI in Tivoli andRational, and a cloud-based offering. From a marketing strategyperspective, the significant role of BI in the Smarter Planetcampaign also boosts IBM's profile.



The company shows an ongoing strong vision in applying its BIplatform to support performance management more widely. IBMhas continued to expand its solution portfolio of packaged analyticalapplications based on the IBM Cognos 8 platform, adding productsfor CRM, supply chain, finance and HR in 2009.

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Cautions



In Gartner's opinion, there are emerging signals that IBM's ability tocontinue to sell its BI platform into firms with application stack-centric sourcing policies may be limited, despite its ability to meettheir needs. Indicatively, 8.5% of the IBM Cognos customerssurveyed said they plan to discontinue using the products in thenext five years, versus 1.5% of customers using SAPBusinessObjects and 3.1% of customers using Oracle BusinessIntelligence Enterprise Edition. IBM does not have businessapplications and does not share the same operational BI vision orcapabilities of Oracle and SAP, which aim to integrate BI platformcapabilities more into the business, analytical, performancemanagement and decision processes defined by their businessapplications. IBM's vision for BI is broad, extending to processesoutside the ERP environment. However, the "jury is still out" onwhether this is as compelling as the tie-up between ERP and BIpromised by its key competitors.



IBM Cognos customers reported a much

diminished customerexperience than in 2008, with support rated among the lowest ofthe vendors in the Magic Quadrant, and an increased incidence ofunreliable/"buggy" software, affecting its Ability to Execute rating. Itshould be noted that 2009 was a transition period for IBM, as itchanged over Cognos customer support to IBM proper, and someCognos customers also experienced account management changesbecause of territory realignments.



As reported in 2008 and 2009, despite its broad functionalcapabilities, most IBM Cognos 8 deployments are still reporting-centric. While the availability of IBM Cognos 8 PowerPlay Studio hassomewhat improved the situation, IBM Cognos users are still lesslikely to do some form of ad hoc analysis than users of its maincompetitors (only Actuate and arcplan showed less usage of ad hocanalysis and discovery).



Despite some elegant messaging explaining its use cases, there arestill questions about IBM's strategy for OLAP, which currentlyincludes three distinct offerings:

Consistent with previous Magic Quadrants, 32% of customerssurveyed reported poor performance as the single most frequentlyreported problem with IBM Cognos 8—

more than for any othervendor included in the Magic Quadrant. However, IBM is working onways to improve performance with dimensionally modeled relational(DMR) data in the IBM Cognos 8 platform in a future release, alongwith native aggregate awareness (currently in beta testing).

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Information Builders

Strengths



Information Builders' WebFocus product is well suited as a platformfor building custom Web-based BI applications, including richInternet applications, often in extranet and public, customer-facing,constituent-facing, supply-chain-facing or partner-facing BI Webapplications where its deployments regularly exceed tens ofthousands of users executing live interactive queries againstmultiple databases.



Information Builders specializes in building highly parameterizedenterprise reporting for report consumers. These report consumerscan specify output formats and drill paths, in addition to measuresand dimensions, through extensive report parameterization options,while also having an exceptional degree of report interactivity. Whilein the past, ad hoc analysis had not been a strength of InformationBuilders, this year, users gave Information Builders an above-average rating for ad hoc analysis, suggesting that InfoAssist,Information Builders' casual user ad hoc reporting and analysis tool,introduced in2008, is gaining positive market traction.

While Information Builders' WebFocus is a mature and fully featuredplatform, survey customers rated it

more difficult to implement,migrate and use, on average, than the platforms of other vendors.This is supported by anecdotal evidence from Gartner inquiries.Information Builders is at a disadvantage with line-of-businessbuyers who are making an increasing percentage of BI purchasingdecisions and are looking first and foremost for easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy platforms.



As extranet deployments continue to be an Information Builders"sweet spot" and go-to-market emphasis, with many of InformationBuilders' customers using custom extranet BI applications built withWebFocus, without knowing they are using Information Builders,expanding brand awareness is an ongoing challenge. Its low brandawareness is a negative factor on revenue growth, which is already

slower than that of the market overall.



As one of the remaining large pure-play BI platform vendors,without the momentum of either the megavendors or the "easy touse" and lighter weight platforms of pure plays, InformationBuilders has experienced slower revenue growth than the marketoverall. It will continue to be challenged in winning broader stack-centric IT-driven enterprise deals or departmentally driven line-of-business deals that fall outside its sweet spot.

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Microsoft

Strengths



Microsoft joined the BI market relatively late, but did so with anattractive set of capabilities, packaging and pricing offerings thatappeal to Microsoft developers and its independent distributorchannel. The company has been consistently investing in itsofferings, which span its Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL Server andMicrosoft SharePoint product lines. By placing Microsoft Excel,Microsoft SQL Server and the very rapidly spreading MicrosoftSharePoint Server at the center of its BI strategy, Microsoft virtuallyguarantees its BI offering's continued adoption, particularly inorganizations with a Microsoft-centric information infrastructure.



Microsoft's lower pricing, bundled packaging and focus on"information worker" productivity make it an attractive propositionfor organizations that want to make BI capabilities more pervasiveacross a wider range of users and reduce their annual softwaremaintenance bills (reduce them compared with the cost of thecompetition in the BI platform market). In the Magic Quadrantcustomer survey, Microsoft customers cited cost less frequently as alimitation to wider deployment, and experienced less complexmigration, than customers of most other vendors in the survey.



Growing market penetration is another of Microsoft's strengths. Wesee a strong intent among our clients and survey respondents topurchase Microsoft BI products. Ease of use for developers andlower total cost of ownership (TCO) are cited as the top reasons forselecting the Microsoft platform. Microsoft's BI platform appeals tothe large community of Microsoft application developers—

itsdevelopment tools are rated among the best in the market by thecustomers we surveyed.



Success in larger deployments is also a strength. While Microsoft'sBI products have historically been labeled as midmarket solutions,we are seeing the Microsoft BI platform move up "the food chain"and be deployed on much larger data volumes to much largernumbers of users, with more of its customers considering it their BIplatform standard than in previous years. Customers in the MagicQuadrant survey report that their Microsoft average deploymentsizes are smaller only than those of Actuate (users), SAP (users)and MicroStrategy (data volume).



Use of OLAP functionality, by Microsoft customers, is double that forthe rest of the survey respondents. This can be attributed to thesuccess and adoption of Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Servicesfunctionality bundled with Microsoft SQL Server.

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Cautions



While Microsoft is on track to continue to grow its market share,communication of product road maps and the synergistic integrationof several of its BI-related product acquisitions (such as Fast,Stratature and ProClarity) have not been as complete and expedientas initially announced and as compared with those of itscompetition.



In comparison with that of its large competitors, its BI user visionremains more narrow and focused on developers, reportingfunctionality and Microsoft Excel, coupled with Microsoft SharePointfunctionality (that is, Microsoft PerformancePoint Services). Ad hocanalysis capabilities for analysts and business users are still a workin progress, although they are expected to be improved with theintroduction of Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel.



Although Microsoft has Microsoft-centric business applications (forexample, Microsoft Dynamics), it is not promoting the sameoperational BI vision or capabilities as Oracle and SAP, which is tointegrate BI platform capabilities more into the business, analytical,performance management and decision processes defined by theirbusiness applications. Moreover, since Microsoft discontinueddevelopment of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 as astand-alone solution for financial analytic applications (for example,planning, budgeting, consolidation), Microsoft's performancemanagement strategy has lagged behind that of the other stackvendors (IBM, Oracle and SAP).



Long development cycles are another point to consider. The productinterdependencies (for example, on Microsoft SharePoint, MicrosoftOffice and Microsoft SQL Server) slow Microsoft's ability to deliverquickly on innovation. These interdependencies also require aMicrosoft BI platform customer to buy into a Microsoft technologystack and have a broad set of expertise to support the differentmoving parts.



There is no single, enterprise, business, metadata layer or capabilityacross Microsoft's BI platform components. Each has its ownmetadata model, which could

Microsoft's focus on the indirect sales channel is another potentialissue. Microsoft has invested in a developer channel program and,while it has made investments in meeting the needs of largeenterprise accounts, its lack of a direct sales channel could make itless competitive against the direct channels of its competition andslow its market penetration. It is not uncommon for Gartner clientsto ask us how to reach their Microsoft account executive,particularly in large accounts.

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MicroStrategy

Strengths



MicroStrategy specializes in enterprise BI deployments running ontop of large enterprise data warehouses and its products areconsidered a BI standard by a higher percentage of its customersthan any other vendor in this year's Magic Quadrant customersurvey. As last year, its customers reported the highest mean datavolume of any vendor surveyed, coupled with a high level ofsatisfaction with technical performance.



While parameterized, interactive reporting for the report consumeris a MicroStrategy sweet spot, MicroStrategy also ranked in the topfive for overall functionality, with particularly strong ratings for BIinfrastructure, metadata, Microsoft Office integration and OLAP,confirming its enterprise pedigree. As more than half theMicroStrategy customer survey respondents are running the latestrelease, this strong rating is, in part, a reflection of satisfaction withthe functional improvements in MicroStrategy 9 (for example, datafederation, integration of Narrowcast Server, in-memory OLAP,dashboard data size and interactivity enhancements, improvedintegration of the reporting and charting engines).



MicroStrategy's parameterized reporting paradigm and object-oriented report development environment have resulted in thelowest IT administrationcosts in the survey. With an extensivelibrary of prebuilt objects, including metrics, prompts, filters andstatistical functions, developers can create reports and otheranalytic content with high degrees of formatting and analyticsophistication with less effort and cost than with other platforms.MicroStrategy's low TCO value proposition is supported by the MagicQuadrant survey data, which shows that MicroStrategy customershave the lowest number of absolute administrators, administratorsper 1,000 users and per 1,000GB than the customers of any othervendor in the survey.



MicroStrategy has built its BI platform from the ground up throughcompletely organic development. The high level of integration of theindividual platform components and the reusability ofMicroStrategy's well-architected and object-oriented semantic layerare the result of this strategy. Without the integration challengesfaced by the megavendors, MicroStrategy has more developmentcycles available for innovation.



Survey data suggests that MicroStrategy has overcome its previous"bad boy of BI" reputation earned from onerous licensing,contracting and rated CPU pricing practices of the past.MicroStrategy is now offering unrated CPU pricing as a primarypricing option. And even though a large portion of MicroStrategycustomers are still on rated contracts—

one source of previouscustomer angst—

above-average ratings for customer experience(pricing and contracting practices and sales relationship) andsupport, and a top-three rating

for view of vendor success suggestthat MicroStrategy is winning over its customers. Moreover, despitebeing a large pure-play BI vendor, even with a checkered past, itscustomers have an above-average positive view of MicroStrategy'sfuture.

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Cautions



While the MicroStrategy development environment is robust andflexible, there is a steep learning curve, even for seasoned reportdevelopers. Outside of parameterized reports that simulate ad hocanalysis for an end user, self-service ad hoc reporting anddashboard creation have not been particularly user-friendly to date.Even though usability enhancements were delivered withMicroStrategy 9, such as more one-click user actions and dashboarddesign wizards, MicroStrategy customers in the Magic Quadrantcustomer survey rate the platform among the most difficult to use.



In a market in which an increasing percentage of buyers are stack-centric, megavendors offering end-to-end BI, CPM, packagedanalytic applications and integration middleware optimized for theirspecific enterprise applications and technology stacks are at adistinct advantage over MicroStrategy in some sales cycles.MicroStrategy's focus on BI platforms excludes it fromconsideration, particularly in enterprise BI standardization projectswhere buyers are looking for single-stack optimizations with theexisting information and application infrastructure.



In 2009, MicroStrategy rebranded its BI platform to shift away fromexclusively catering for the high-end enterprise market.MicroStrategy Reporting Suite includes a fully featured and capablefree version, which is upwardly compatible with new departmentaland enterprise packages. Even though this new pricing andpositioning strategy maps well to new market realities, redefiningthe brand andimage will take time and effort. To succeed,MicroStrategy must overcome its reputation as a high-end vendorand reduce the complexities that are often associated withMicroStrategy development and deployment.



While MicroStrategy has added OEM relationships, including anumber of SaaS vendors, and developed partnerships to deliverindustry-specific solutions leveraging its strong product vision, itsgeographic presence and packaged analytic applications (starterkits) continue to be more limited, both in number and geography,than those of other leading BI platforms.

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Oracle

Strengths



Oracle has established the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)platform as the "BI standard" in 82% of the references thatresponded to our Magic Quadrant survey. It also has the widestrange of BI platform capabilities employed (for example, reporting,dashboards, ad hoc query). This was among the top three sets ofresults in our survey.



The availability and sales momentum of Oracle's own packaged BIapplications built on the OBIEE platform attest to the platform'sinfrastructure capabilities and Oracle's understanding of marketinterest in domain-specific and prepackaged solutions. They also actas a growth driver for the platform.



Oracle has maintained a consistent vision of its BI platform as a keyenabling technology of its overall enterprise performancemanagement product strategy and BI application developmentplans.



Improvements in the integration of security and administrationcapabilities benefit the large installed base of customers usingOracle applications, middleware and database technologies. Oraclewas one of the two vendors with the highest percentage ofcustomers planning to deploy its BI products across their enterprise(rather than in just a single department or multiple departments).



Oracle has a well-established direct sales force selling the OBIEEoffering, coupled with a large number of system integrators andvalue-added resellers incorporating OBIEE into their offerings.



Oracle was one of the top three vendors for product quality. It hassignificantly improved its support scores since our last MagicQuadrant survey.



Oracle has created within its references a very positive perception ofits vision and success. Magic Quadrant survey respondents had abetter opinion of its future and success than they did for itscompetitors.

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Cautions



Lack of new and leading-edge innovation is something to beconsidered. Much effort is being put into integrating the Oracle BIplatform with the wide variety of Oracle business applications andother middleware technologies. And integration with Oracle businessapplications is indicated in our survey as the primary reason forselecting the Oracle BI platform. While this will benefit the Oracleinstalled base of customers, Oracle lags behind the competition inintroducing new and innovative solutions, such as the ability tointegrate interactive visualization, search and collaboration as partof the BI platform offering.



Oracle has an in-memory database that it acquired from TimesTen.However, at a time when most of its competitors (both stack andpure-play)

Customers indicated that concerns they had with support were dueto Oracle being "slow to respond."



Lack of "data quality" was the No. 1 reason given by surveyedcustomers when asked about limitations to wider deployments ofOBIEE. This could, inpart, be because OBIEE is often used for datafederation to query directly against enterprise data sources withoutthe benefit of the data quality processes that occur in a datawarehouse.



Surveyed customers continue to indicate that OBIEE, for thedeveloper role, is more difficult to use, on average, than other BIplatforms.

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Panorama Software

Strengths



The core strength of Panorama NovaView remains its use as a frontend for OLAP databases such as SAP NetWeaver BW and MicrosoftAnalysis Services via Multidimensional Expressions (MDX).Customers surveyed ranked Panorama Software No. 1 for OLAPfunctionality, and a higher proportion of NovaView users performcomplex analysis (21%) than do users of the products of othervendors featured in the Magic Quadrant. (Panorama Software'scustomers also rated it best in the sample for search-based BI,despite its lack of functionality in this area—

that more than 200,000 users haveadopted its data-analysis-in-the-cloud offering. Further, its newFlash-based user interface applies code built with Google for itsSaaS solution and makes it available to Panorama Software's on-premises customers as part

of NovaView 6.



The main item of innovation for Panorama Software in the past yearwas the launch of its Universal Data Connector, which allows it, forthe first time, to offer relational online analytical processing(ROLAP)-style analysis by automatically mapping and modelingrelational data sources to deliver interactive reports.

Organizations using Microsoft, SAP and Oracle's OLAP databases areincreasingly using these vendors' own OLAP front ends beforeconsidering competing products such as NovaView, despite itsfunctional strength over their offerings in many cases.



Panorama Software also faces increasing indirect competition fromdata discovery vendors (positioned as Challengers in this year'sMagic Quadrant). In Panorama Software's case this is significant, asthese competitors offer alternative ways of doing the "slice anddice" analysis that is NovaView's core value proposition. Perhapsdue to these competitive factors, when asked "Has your view ofPanorama Software as a BI platform supplier to your organizationchanged in the past 12 months?" its reference customers surveyedhad a less optimistic view than the overall sample.



Panorama NovaView runs natively against data sources over whichit has no control. Perhaps as a result, despite its strong cachingcapabilities and efficient MDX support, the main problem reportedby NovaView customers remains poor performance (cited by 23% ofcustomers). To get the best from Panorama, organizations mustfirst optimize the performance of their OLAP implementations.



Panorama Software's deployments tend to be departmental innature, andits specialism in "front ending" OLAP keeps it a (veryeffective) Niche Player, rather than a player that competes forbroad-reach BI. Its customers rated its functionality among thebottom three vendors in eight of the categories it offers (reporting,development tools, dashboards, BI infrastructure, interactivevisualization, Microsoft Office integration, scorecards, andcollaboration).



Almost half the surveyed organizations using Panorama Softwarehad not yet set a BI standard. Of those that had, SAPBusinessObjects was the most frequently cited. This makes sense,as the strengths of these two BI platforms would complement eachother, with SAP Business Objects historically weaker in the OLAPuser interface (however, its new SAP BusinessObjects Pioneerproduct due out i n 2010 represents a threat to NovaVi ew i n SAPNetWeaver BW shops).

QlikView is a self-contained BI platform with purpose-built ETLfunctionality that lets users rapidly combine data from different datasources, an in-memory data store, and a set of well-integrated BItools for building

highly interactive applications. It is particularlywell suited for the ease-of-use and IT independence needs ofworkgroups and departments. Surveyed customers rank QlikViewabove the products of most other vendors for ease of use for endusers, ease of use for developers and low cost of implementationwhen asked for the top reasons for choosing a vendor.



The application of QlikView for workgroup analytic applicationsbelies its powerful performance capabilities on large data, as itsmemory analytic model, 64-bit architecture and significantcustomizations built for the Intel chipset have made it one of themost "performant" BI platforms on the market. Surveyed customersrate QlikTech among the best vendors in the survey forperformance, albeit on smallerdata sizes and for smaller numbersof end users than most other vendors.



Organizations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate resultsquickly, particularly in the current economic environment.QlikTech's strategy of penetrating accounts with low-costdeployments and its ability to rapidly build proof of conceptscontinue to be compelling reasons organizations choose QlikTechover other vendors. Gartner frequently sees companies deployQlikView for use in rapid prototyping and requirements gathering,even alongside—

and while they take a much longer time to deploy—

their enterprise BI standard platform.



Enhancing its low-cost value proposition, since 2009, users havebeen able to download a free version of QlikView 9 for personal use,with extensive, free, Web-based training available. Also, QlikViewcan now be deployed in the cloud via Amazon EC2 to further speedtime to value, scale capacity on the fly, and give users the benefit oflower upfront costs.

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Cautions



For QlikTech to move firmly into the Leaders quadrant, it needs toshow more examples of large BI deployments that deliver a varietyof analytical capabilities to thousands of users, and it needs toevolve to support the meshing of departmental silos withenterprisedeployments. While QlikView deployments are growing andspreading to multiple departments and, in many cases, to theenterprise, the survey data shows that its data sizes and number ofend users continue to be well below average. Moreover, despiteQlikView's success, it is not often an enterprise standard and isfrequently deployed to complement existing BI platformimplementations.



QlikView 9 delivers better usage monitoring, resource allocation andload balancing targeted at better enterprisesupport, but surveyedQlikTech customers rank it near the bottom when compared withother vendors for ability to support large numbers of users.Moreover, as QlikView is targeting larger BI deployments spanningthe enterprise, the lack of an enterprise semantic layer, whileexpedient for personal, workgroup and departmental deployments,requires additional effort or external management of metadata tolock down common definitions, calculations, and conformeddimensions for cross-functional analysis across QlikViewapplications. Security, while unified and well suited for departments,requires definition in the QlikView load script. The lack of write-backis also a frequently cited concern by enterprise users.



Success can often be a two-edged sword. In our last MagicQuadrant, QlikTech could do no wrong on any measure in ourcustomer survey. This year, in addition to challenges with largenumbers of users, QlikTech scored below average in support,suggesting that the company could be experiencing growing pains

resulting from its success and rapid growth.



"A perfect storm" of factors has been key to QlikView's success.QlikView's innovative and disruptive combination of in-memorytechnology, built-in data integration and mashup capability, andintuitive end-user tools hit the market at a time when 64-bitcomputing enabled scalability of that model. At the same time,users were disillusioned with the need to go through IT for analysisand the economic environment favored smaller, low-costdeployments. But what is

next? QlikTech needs to show a clearvision to continue its success into the medium term. It has a visionfor incremental improvements to its current product, but faces morecompetition and lacks the statistical and predictive modelingcapabilities of some of its most similar competitors, including SAS(JMP), Advizor Solutions, Tableau and Tibco Software (Spotfire). Italso faces threats from larger vendors, such as Microsoft with SQLServer PowerPivot (also known as Gemini), IBM with CognosExpress, and SAP with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, all of whichare intent on narrowing QlikView's opportunities for differentiation.

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SAP

Strengths



According to the customers taking part in our Magic Quadrantsurvey, SAP supports among the largest deployments in terms ofnumbers of end users and data volumes.



SAP is continuing Business Objects' established strategy ofproviding leading-edge capabilities, many which complement its BIplatform, in the areas of collaboration and decision support, textanalytics, in-memory analytics, OnDemand BI (SaaS), searchcoupled with BI, data integration with lineage and impact analysis,and data quality.



SAP has one of the largest channel and services ecosystems: it ispresent in 127 countries with 5,250 channel partners, 1,350 value-added resellers globally and 850 OEMs. The combination of SAP andBusiness Objects has formed the largest installed base in themarket. Gartner estimates this installed base to be more than46,000 customers.



SAP BusinessObjects' reporting and ad hoc query capabilitiescontinue to be cited as its

top strength by its customers, while forSAP NetWeaver BW, OLAP is cited as its most capable area,reflecting the potential of the two product lines brought together bySAP's acquisition of Business Objects. A new OLAP product, SAPBusinessObjects Pioneer, which will replace SAP Business Explorer(BEx) Analyzer and SAP BusinessObjects Voyager, has been definedaccording to the SAP BusinessObjects product road map.



The SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator continues to provide amuch-needed option for performance and implementationimprovements to the SAP installed base of SAP NetWeaver BWcustomers—

poor performance and implementation difficulty werecited as problems by more than 42% and 53% of these customers,respectively (this is almost three times moreoften than for anyother BI platform). The upcoming release of SAP BusinessObjectsAccelerator coupled with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer should givecasual users a way to access and explore large amounts of data in a"performant" way.

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Cautions



For the third year in a row, customer survey data shows thatcustomer support ratings for SAP are lower than for any othervendor in our customer survey. Overall customer experience scoresthat include support, sales experience and software quality are alsoat the lowest levels. These results are not unusual in the aftermathof an acquisition. To address these challenges, SAP has put in placeprograms to address customer issues with support and to address,more broadly, the customer experience.



Usage terms, not previously defined in older contracts for virtualizeddeployments, have led to confrontational experiences with SAP forsome Business Objects customers. In the middle of 2009, SAPadded virtualization definition and a migration path to newcontracts.

Installed base customers with old contracts could still besubject to additional fees from an audit.



SAP NetWeaver BW customers that have implemented the BEx BItools are re-examining their BI strategy. These companies aredetermining what role SAP BusinessObjects and SAP NetWeaver BWwill play in their architecture and strategy in the future. Theinstalled base SAP customers indicate that although SAP haspromised backward compatibility via BI Consumer Services (BICS)and a migration path for SAP BEx Analyzer customers moving toSAP BusinessObjects Pioneer, the migration, implementation andintegration choices can be confusing. Moreover, until SAPBusinessObjects Pioneer is introduced (2H10), committed BExAnalyzer users will not have an equivalent tool for Excel-based OLAPanalysis in the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio.

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SAS

Strengths



SAS's approach to BI continues to focus on the more advancedtechnologies, such as forecasting, predictive modeling andoptimization, and embedding them into cross-functional andindustry-specific analytical applications. As such, SAS remains themost widely known analytics and data mining vendor and itscustomers use data mining or predictive modeling extensively.Although SAS focuses on advanced technologies, survey datasuggests that its customers use a broad range of SAS BIcapabilities.



SAS derives alarge percentage of its revenue and growth frompackaged analytical applications that leverage its BI platform andincorporate analytics into cross-functional and industry applicationsfor vertical sectors, such as the financial services, retail,pharmaceutical and life sciences sectors. With applications such asrisk management, customer intelligence, warranty analysis andanti-money-laundering, SAS leverages its core advanced analyticsstrength to build pull-through revenue for the lesser-known BIplatform, while providing insulation from pricing pressure in the BIplatform tools market.

SAS's strong global brand for predictive analytics, its marketingprowess and extensive technology portfolio make it a strongcontender in the BI space, competing successfully—

even againstmuch larger infrastructure vendors. The Magic Quadrant surveyshows that SAS customers have an above-average view of thefuture for SAS and view SAS in the top five vendors when askedabout the success of vendor deployments in their organizations.



SAS customers rate their sales experience with SAS above average,despite complaints about pricing. This is likely because manycustomers have been SAS customers for years, with strong salesrelationships developed over those years of engagement.

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Cautions



SAS is facing an unprecedented challenge to its historicaldominance in the predictive analytics space. IBM's acquisition ofSPSS puts the full force and power of the IBM machine behind thepredictive analytics market's No. 2 vendor—

SAS has beenaccustomed to competing against a much smaller vendor. At thesame time, other leading BI platform vendors, many pure-playvendors (Information Builders, Tibco Software [Spotfire],MicroStrategy) and most of the megavendors (SAP, IBM, Microsoft)have either introduced or matured capabilities to make statistics,predictive analytic models and forecasting algorithms moreconsumable in reports, dashboards and analytic applications. "R,"an open-source predictive analytics software alternative to SAS, ismaking significant inroads into the academic community, SAS'shistorical stronghold and "seeding ground" for future sales. Andwhile SAS is leveraging "R" algorithms, statisticians are graduatingfrom universities trained in "R" rather than traditional SAS, whichmay negatively affect SAS's future sales.



Although SAS has made progress in providing tools for usersbeyond its traditional user base, it has still not significantly brokenout of its sweet spot. For "bread and butter" BI deployments,including ad hoc query, reporting and dashboarding, SAS is slowlygaining traction, but users typically do not consider SAS analternative to its mainstream competition. SAS is trying to cross-sellthe SAS BI Server into existing accounts, rather than leading withthe reporting product. Although SAS can provide the technology,customers with low-complexity BI requirements rarely consider SASat all.



Despite SAS's success and brand awareness as a leading vendor inthe BI platform market, particularly in the predictive analyticsspace, the company continues to struggle to make it onto BIplatform shortlists because of historical perceptions of limitations inusability. Even in SAS installed-base accounts, most SAS customersdo not consider SAS their enterprise BI standard. These perceptionsare confirmed by our Magic Quadrant survey—

customers ratedSAS below average for ease of use. At the same time, customersthat report having a BI platform standard using another vendor'stechnology, also often use SAS for special-purpose predictiveanalytics solutions that the standard platform cannot provide.

If QlikTech was the "darling" of last year's Magic Quadrant, Tableauarguably earns that distinction this year. It gained overwhelminglypositive customer survey feedback across the board forfunctionality, product quality, support, customer relationship,success and view of the vendor's future.



Tableau is one of a number of smaller, pure-play vendors deliveringstrong interactive visualization for analysis. This is the first yearTableau has been able to meet the inclusion criteria for the MagicQuadrant.

Tableau's strong performance, even during the recession,is driven by its ability to meet the increased market demand foreasy-to-use and intuitive, interactive BI tools that are easy todeploy without IT assistance. Survey customers cite ease of use forend users and developers, implementation cost and effort, and TCOas the key reasons for choosing Tableau more often than do thecustomers of most other vendors in the survey.



Tableau's self-contained BI platform provides purpose-built ETLcapabilities with data connectors that leverage Tableau's own VizQLtechnology (drag-and-drop operations in Tableau create a query inVizQL, which interprets and packages a Structured Query Language[SQL] or MDX query to the database and then expresses theresponse graphically). This allows users, without IT assistance, toconnect to any data source and produce a series of interactivedashboards, and highlight and visually filter and pass parametersdirectly from a graphic, or use filters (for example, check boxes,sliders, relative date filters, drop-down menus), or build ingeographic intelligence to analyze their data. Interactive analysiscan be shared with a report consumer equipped with a Webbrowser.



Customer survey data shows that Tableau was chosen more oftenfor

functionality than any other vendor in the survey, with one ofthe highest overall product functionality scores, while rating secondonly to Tibco Spotfire in interactive visualization, its products' mainstrength. Even though Tableau's products are chosen for theirunique functionality more often than the products of other vendors,they are still largely departmentally deployed and less likely to beconsidered an enterprise BI standard than the products of othervendors. This paradox suggests that, much like similar productsQlikView and Tibco Spotfire, Tableau's products often fill an unmetneed in organizations that already have a BI standard and arefrequently deployed as a complementary capability to an existing BIplatform.



While differentiated functionality is one ingredient in Tableau'ssuccess, strong product quality is another. Tableau was rankedsecond in the survey for no problems reported. It was the onlyvendor in the survey for which customers reported below-averageissues (albeit for a small

number of users and small data sizes)across all issue categories measuring product quality, functionality,usability, performance and scalability.

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Cautions



Tableau's products are less widely deployed and less proven inlarge, enterprise deployments, having a smaller number of endusers and smaller data sizes than the vendor average. Tableaurated above average in all functional areas except for BIinfrastructure and metadata management, which is further evidencethat Tableau's support for enterprise features is a work in progress.



Tableau's partner program is in its infancy, lagging behind that ofsimilar vendors (such as QlikTech [QlikView] and Tibco Software[Spotfire]). But it has made some progress in increasing its numberof resellers in the past year and has a number of OEM partners,most notably Oracle as a front-end tool option to Oracle Essbase(Visual Explorer).



Although users rate Tableau's reporting functionality above average,they are less likely to deploy its platform for static or parameterizedreporting than they are other vendor platforms. This should come asno surprise, as ad hoc, interactive analysis is Tableau's sweet spot.



As is not uncommon with a small vendor, Tableau is initiallypursuing a horizontal platform strategy and has not embarked ondeveloping vertical or industry-specific applications. It has a verylimited international presence, with current language support forEnglish only.



Given the success of Tableau and other interactive visualizationvendors, other leading BI platform vendors are trying to mimic(either by internally developing or acquiring) its functionality, whichcould threaten Tableau's long-term prospects as apure-playvendor.

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Targit

Strengths



Targit is an established BI vendor, founded in 1986 and based inHjorring, Denmark, with a subsidiary in Tampa, Florida. Targit hasmarketed its BI Suite since 1996, predominantly in the Nordicregion. While Targit's products are sold and supported worldwide,its core market remains Scandinavia. Targit's central valueproposition is to make BI easier to use, getting "business insightwith as few clicks as possible." This assertion is supported by thefact that Targit customers in the Magic Quadrant survey rate Targitabove average for ease of use. The company holds eight patents forvarious components of its products.

that help in setting up the Targitenvironment with very little user intervention. The platform doeseverything from scheduled report generation, drill-down anddashboarding to intelligent search, alerting and some level of datamining, all blended into a single product.



Targit built a philosophy around its offering named Computer-AidedLeadership and Management (CALM) that follows its OODA Loop,which stands for "observe,

orient, decide, act." Through integratingall components of the BI Suite, the end user remains inside the BIenvironment, increasing the consistency of the user experience,speeding up the decision process, and reducing the need to movebetween differenttools.



The introduction of an innovative alerting solution, called Sentinels(essentially prediction-based rules), enables an end user to reactquickly to alerts for certain indicators. Through the combination withTargit's desktop alerts, a user gets anearly-warning notificationwhen a predefined rule has been violated and the user canproactively take corrective measures. This capability adds to Targit'sattractiveness for end users.

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Cautions



While well known in Scandinavia, particularly on its home turf inDenmark, Targit has virtually no brand recognition in other regions.Although Targit has customers around the globe, it almost nevercomes up as a contender on shortlists outside its core region.Targit's limited—

and its resellers' nonexistent—

marketing isreducing the vendor's ability to compete with its much larger globalcompetitors.



For Targit to work properly, it requires a data warehouse withdefined dimensions and measures. The Targit platform can accessdata sources such as Microsoft SQL Server (including ReportingServices and Analysis Services), IBM DB2 (including Cube Views),as well as Oracle, all through Open Database Connectivity (ODBC).While the ODBC connectivity to otherdata sources, such as SAPNetWeaver BW, Teradata, Sybase, Netezza, Ingres and MySQL maywork, those are not officially supported. Native adapters toapplications such as SAP, Oracle, Infor (see Note 1) and MicrosoftDynamics are not available.



Although Targit does not openly say it, its solution must beconsidered targeted at a Microsoft environment. While theintegration with Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePointServer is rather comprehensive, other DBMSs and portal servers donot receive the same amount of attention, support anddevelopment.



While Targit is considered an enterprise standard by most of itscustomers, it is very much a midsize enterprise, departmental andworkgroup BI solution. Customer survey data suggests that Targitdeployments

are on some of the smallest data volumes and to someof the smallest numbers of end users in the survey, higher onlythan those of Board International.

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Tibco Software (Spotfire)

Strengths



Tibco Spotfire has a flexible and easy-to-use environment based ona unique architecture for building and using analytic applications.This architecture has been particularly attractive for delivering onrequirements for personal and workgroup applications

where TibcoSpotfire fills a need often not addressed by enterprise BI vendors.Customers choose Tibco Spotfire for its functionality and ease of usemore often than they do most other vendors, even though it is lesslikely to be their enterprise standard. Like QlikView, Tibco Spotfire'sinteractive visualization approach has become a more widelyaccepted, and even preferred, end-user paradigm and represents acompelling alternative to traditional BI platforms. As a result, in thisyear's Magic Quadrant, Tibco has moved from the Visionaries to theChallengers quadrant.

Tibco Spotfire is a self-contained, well-integrated BI platform, whichin particular offers data lineage capabilities typically provided onlyby more enterprise-ready BI platforms. The user interface displaysinformation about the origin of the data table, together with anytransformations or other modifications that have been applied to theoriginal source data. The developer user interface shows lineage allthe way down to the source data table.



Tibco Spotfire is well

positioned to take advantage of the increaseGartner is predicting in market demand for packaged analyticapplications. A third of Tibco Spotfire's customers use one or moreof its specific packaged applications for life sciences, manufacturing,financial

Much like the other Challenger pure-play vendors (for example,QlikTech and Tableau) that are hitting the market sweet spot forintuitive, highly interactive and lightweight BI platforms, Tibcocustomers are very satisfied with all aspects of the relationship,rating it above average in support, customer experience,performance, view of vendor's future and achievement of businessbenefits.

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Cautions



Tibco Spotfire survey customers report deployments relatively lowon data volumes and the number of end users compared with thoseof other vendors. This survey data supports anecdotal evidence thatTibco Spotfire is not used by a large number of users in most oftheir deployments, nor is it used to analyze particularly large datasets. However, in looking at the survey details, there are somecustomer references with extremely large data sets and thousandsof users that belie this reputation.



Tibco Spotfire scored among the lowest in the reference survey onthe BI platform standardization question. The combination of thisresult with Tibco Spotfire's strong functionality ratings suggests thatwhile Tibco Spotfire is not usually the enterprise standard, it hasbeen successful in augmenting the BI standard when more flexiblediscovery-based analysis is required.



While Tibco Spotfire is rated among the highest in the survey for adhoc analysis, interactive visualization and predictive analytics, it israted in

the bottom third of vendors for static and parameterizedreporting, confirming that its true sweet spot is in providing aflexible environment for advanced analysis.



Magic Quadrant survey customers rate Tibco Spotfire below averagefor its development tools, BI infrastructure and metadata, which isfurther evidence that it continues to be best suited for workgroupand departmental deployments.



While Operations Analytics (OA) is a strong first step in achievingthe Tibco Spotfire vision of closed-loop process analytics thatincorporates root cause analysis and what-if modeling throughintegration with Tibco middleware for closed-loop analysis, rulesauthoring, and event processing, there has been limited customeradoption of the combination of Tibco eventprocessing with TibcoSpotfire analysis. Very few of Tibco's customers are tying back toTibco Spotfire to close the loop. Although this is on the road map,Tibco Spotfire does not yet deliver a real-time business activitymonitoring client that would enable the analysis of real-time changeas events occur.